Our collective jaws dropped at the conclusion of their set that day...

Album track of the year:

David Lynch - Strange and Unproductive Thinking

12" of the year:

Burial VS Massive Attack - Paradise Circus/Four Walls

The if I had the money I probably would have bought it artifact of the year goes to this.

Biggest disappointment gig of the year goes to the Nick Drake tribute...gawd I was bored at this gig. So fugn polite. Am I the only person who doesn't get Robyn (I'm bonkers me I yam) Hitchcock? It was so nice to see Green Gartside on stage again tho for the first time since I caught the trio Scritti#1 (with Tom and Nial) numerous times back in the late 70's...

Biggest disappointment of the year also goes to the gigs that ill health stopped me from going to (Underground Resistance/HTRK and Black Cab at The Tote)

Radio Luxembourg - Story (mp3)
A dip into the rich history of Radio Luxembourg. Often referred to, erroneously, as a pirate, 'Luxy' was thoroughly licensed from its start in the early 1930s. In the days when the BBC distanced itself from entertainment, Luxembourg rose to the challenge, beaming the UK with a first taste of commercial radio. Commercial it was too, in a 21st century brand integration way. The transmitters were seized during the War, and happy presenters were replaced by the tones of Lord Haw Haw, whose 'Germany Calling' call-sign can be impersonated by the generation which heard him, and which later saw him hanged for treason. The new Luxy flourished after the War. Having moved to its famous 208m position on the medium wave, it was embraced by a young Britain both before the 'pirate' era - and beyond, as a young UK 'independent local radio' pursued its early 'worthy' programme policy. Owing to the format gap, Luxy bounced through the seventies and only began to suffer real attrition as Radio One moved to FM; and commercial radio was freed for a more populist approach and the growing network seized Luxy revenue. The station eventually waved farewell to 208 in 1991 - and remained on satellite until its closure a year later. The station is remembered to this day for: 'the Ovaltineys' sponsored programmes; the presenters it spawned (Murray, Savile, Edmonds, Freeman); the poor reception ('the Luxembourg effect'); and for being listened to 'under the bedclothes' (unavoidable really, it only managed to occupy its frequencies in the nightime).Via

John Cage performing on Nam June Paik's TV special called 'Good Morning Mr. Orwell' from 1984. In the beginning, we see that Cage is joined by Takehisa Kosugi and one other unidentified person. perhaps they were performing a composition or improvisation that they would have done during a Merce Cunningham dance. there is also a cut away to a Joseph Bueys piano performance art piece.MORE(Thanx Michael!)

Download high quality version: http://bit.ly/v04Z25
Description: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4800.en.html
Jacob Appelbaum, Roger Dingledine: How governments have tried to block Tor
Iran blocked Tor handshakes using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in January 2011 and September 2011. Bluecoat tested out a Tor handshake filter in Syria in June 2011. China has been harvesting and blocking IP addresses for both public Tor relays and private Tor bridges for years.

Late one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903...

'...You know what anarchists have always believed.''Yes.''Tell me,' she said.'The urge to destroy is a creative urge.''This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.'- Don DeLilloCosmopolis (2003)

“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.
They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.
Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson...MORE

Mickey at home with Maria and Chanelle. Photo credit: Jocelyn Bain Hogg, The Firm
UK photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg spent ten years documenting organized crime life, from the activity of British gangsters in South London to their exile in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With unprecedented access, these glaring images capture the storied villains at home, salacious private parties, unlicensed boxing matches, business talks ,and funerals of the “the old-school Godfathers of British crime” whose deaths would fracture and decentralize the social order within these underworld societies. The Firm was completed in 2001, re-visted in 2008, and is now on view at London’s Foto 8 Gallery through January 14.
“These are not the faces of criminals who hide behind the facade of respectability or the corruption of political influence. They are, in fact, the real thing, men who hold their head up when challenged, and who seek no false redemption in the face of public vilification...”MORE

One response to our stunned impotence in the face of financial meltdown, political chicanery and the creeping surveillance society, is to indulge in fugues of entropy tourism. Badlands dérives. Websites clanking with scrap metal, the refuse of military hardware, sump-oil lakes, pastiche Tarkovsky. The recent invasion of the Lower Lea Valley (the Olympics site) by fork-tongued instruments of global capitalism, hellbent on improving the image of destruction, has been duplicated by raiding parties bearing cameras and notebooks, the tattered footsoldiers of anarchy: retro-geographers, punk Vorticists. Sentimentalists of every stripe are undertaking knotweed rambles as pilgrimages to rescue the last remnants of locality by reciting threatened names made sacred by generations of unacknowledged predecessors: Hackney Wick, Temple Mills, Isle of Dogs. Every trudge around the perimeter fence of the Australian super-mall and its satellite stadium is a recapitulation of William Blake's itinerary, as laid out in his mythopoeic masterpiece, Jerusalem: "thro' Hackney & Holloway towards London / Till he came to old Stratford, & thence to Stepney & the Isle / Of Leutha's Dogs".
Old Stratford, transport hub, retail cathedral, birthplace of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, drew me back with its intimations of a new England, a city state outside time and beyond culture. Compulsory diversions have been arranged, systems of barricades and cones, to funnel random pedestrians through chasms of glass and steel towards the shimmering illusion of the Westfield oasis. It took something special to make me reach for my camera, all the evidence had already been logged and relogged. Just as my futile presence, in its turn, was captured on hours of security tape, scans from overhead drones.
Walking away from the revamped container stack looking over the Olympic stadium, I found something worth recording. The poster with the smirking, corkscrew-haired young woman chosen to promote another meaningless development opportunity had been customised with black pennies over the eyes, stickers announcing: "SAVAGE MESSIAH". Was this a band paying their respects to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska? (Savage Messiah is the title of a biography of the sculptor, by HS Ede, published in 1931.) Or was it an art school tribute to the subversive dynamism of Blast and Wyndham Lewis? In a shallow, fast-twitch period we thrive on commodified speed-dating, quoting the quote, Xeroxing energy sources to make them into marketable brands. If Ede's book was not the inspiration, perhaps the neo-Vorticists of Stratford had chanced on Ken Russell's 1972 film with the same title, scripted by the poet Christopher Logue, and featuring Dorothy Tutin and Scott Antony as the fated pair, Gaudier and his Polish lover, the troubled Sophie Brzeska?
The mystery of the defaced poster was solved when I discovered Laura Oldfield Ford's samizdat pamphlets, recording moody expeditions, pub crawls, mooches through the kingdom of the dead that is liminal London. Even the author's name seemed like a serendipitous marriage of Blake's Old Ford and the poet Charles Olson's notion of open-field poetics (the contrary of the current fetish for enclosures). The original Savage Messiah "zines" are serial diaries of ranting and posing among ruins. Ford delivers the prose equivalent of a photo-romance in quest of a savage messiah with attitude, cheekbones and wolverine eyes. A feral, leather-jacketed manifestation of place.
Collided into a great block, the catalogue of urban rambles takes on a new identity as a fractured novel of the city. Slim pamphlets, now curated and glossily repackaged, have an awkward relationship with their guerrilla source. With a formal introduction and a cover price a penny short of £20, it is difficult to sustain the swagger of the throwaway form, strategically manipulated to look like dirty sheets on which you can smell the ink, glue, semen and toxic mud. The structure depends on a steady drip-feed of quotes from JG Ballard, Italo Calvino, Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin. White men all, festering in elective suburbs of hell, where they labour to finesse a paradise park of language.
Moving beyond this relentless Xeroxing of the entire genealogy of protest from Blast to Sniffin' Glue, by way of Situationism and psychogeography, Oldfield Ford displays authentic gifts as a recorder and mapper of terrain. She is a necessary kind of writer, smart enough to bring document and poetry together in a scissors-and-paste, post-authorial form. Like so many before her, psychotic or inspired, she trudges far enough to dissolve ego and to identify with the non-spaces into which she is voyaging. "This unknown territory has become my biography." Her story is eroticised by the prospect of riot, anecdotes teased from smouldering industrial relics. The "euphoric levitation" of brutalist tower blocks. Post-coital reveries from "an ugly night on ketamine in a New Cross squat".
Alongside the standard tropes of entropy tourism, talk of "mystical portals", Heathrow as a "mesh of paranoia", Oldfield Ford experiences sudden illuminating shifts of consciousness. "The air is perfumed, the sky pink. My hair is loose, unkempt, I am in a red dress descending into the chlorine scent of a disused pool." Ballardian riffs anticipate plague, soul sickness, breakdown of the social contract. "There wasn't a fixed point where the malaise started." In the end, it's about walking as a way of writing, recomposing London by experiencing its secret signs and obstacles.
When writers identify with the city that feeds and sustains them, they become plural. They abdicate originality. Sophie Brzeska, after Gaudier had been killed in the first world war, embarked on a London walk as random and driven as anything undertaken by Oldfield Ford. As Ede reports: "She walked all through the night … talking and swearing more loudly than ever … a strange, gaunt woman with short hair, no hat, and shoes cut into the form of sandals. She felt the world was against her."
@'The Guardian'